The Coming Convergence of “Race Realism” & Precision Medicine:
Opportunities & Challenges for White Advocates

3,592 words

We need new tactics to both fend off attacks against our identity, such as by defusing accusations of “racism,” and also to be able to define ourselves through a positive, modern self-image. In my last article I put forward a strategy to accomplish the first, and in this one I am going to outline a tactic for the second. This task will become feasible by the powerful backwind provided by scientific progress, which in the next decade will result in the convergence of large-scale public initiatives in precision medicine with the old “race realism” movement (aka “human biodiversity”). With the right strategy, these developments could provide an unparalleled opportunity for white advocates.

As I discussed previously, terminology matters a great deal. Value-laden, politically-charged words of power like “race” and “racism” cannot be used against their intended applications, as their proponents have spent literally billions of dollars to imbue them with a specific intent. Unless you can spend an equal or greater amount of money, you cannot bend these terms to your purpose. White advocates surely don’t have billions at our disposal to come up with equally powerful terms to counter this.

Or do we? I am going to propose a strategy of asymmetrical verbal warfare that may accomplish just that.

To understand how this could work, I will first briefly review the relevant history of the term “race” in academia. Over the last five or so decades, the term “race” has undergone a drastic semantic shift. In the humanities (including the social sciences), as a result of billions of dollars spent in a concerted brainwashing effort, “race” has become a tainted term. Stripped of its biological component entirely, it was redefined as a “social construct,” primarily characterized by how anti-biological and malleable it is. Today, the term itself can only be used in a sentence as a subject of the original sin of our times: “racism.”

In the hard sciences, given that the biological element could not be ignored, a different transformation occurred to accommodate this cultural shift. Simply put, geneticists have adopted a rebranding strategy by substituting the term “race” with innocuous-sounding jargon such as “population” or “genetic ancestry.” This appears to have worked beautifully so far. Social scientists, who generally speaking have a very poor grasp of actual science, have continued to enjoy their ignorant bliss, creating biology-free explanations for the human condition. Geneticists were then left undisturbed to pursue their exploration of the effects of genetic differences on phenotypic variation, protected by their literature’s obtuse jargon. Thus, contrary to popular wisdom, “race”-based science is not only alive and well, it has actually seen an accelerating pace of progress over the last two decades. The reason why you haven’t heard about it is because it was simply renamed to hide it from public view.

It is also highly important to note that this latter effort — both the “rebranding” and the research itself — has also received billions of dollars in investment (see the “All of Us”[1] and “Genome UK”[2] initiatives in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively). These developments led to the paradoxical situation of there never having been stronger evidence for socially relevant genetic variation, while at the same time there has also never been a greater taboo against talking about this in public.

Such a contradictory state of affairs could never last in the long term, of course, as no amount of jargon can forever conceal some of the most damaging recent revelations. These include the first tentative maps of the genetic architecture of cognition[3] (aka intelligence, another rebranded term) and the vast genetic differences between Africans and other populations.[4] These were only preludes, however, as by far the most problematic outcome will be the intersection of these findings; that is, how much of the heritable component of behavioral traits vary based on genetic ancestry.

Many liberal academics are already deeply worried about this, fearing that their jargon will no longer be able to hide the implications of this research. And they are right to worry, as in terms of substance, this will actually mean the convergence of the official scientific record with what used to be denounced as “racist pseudoscience” only a few years ago. The way many academics are dealing with this emerging reality is by practicing an astounding level of doublethink and then grappling with the ensuing cognitive dissonance. However, there is no escape: the academic establishment will either concede that genetic ancestry accounts for a substantial fraction of human variation, or else none of the precision medicinal programs will work. And since they cannot undo two decades of scientific discoveries, nor are they willing to return the billions already committed to their funding budgets, the inevitable outcome will be a major shift in academia’s stance on this matter.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.

I cannot overstate the importance of this imminent development. This will no longer be a few outcast social scientists arguing about IQ and crime statistics based on observational studies. The entire scientific establishment will come to terms with the molecular evidence that lays bare the inequality inherent to the human condition. The fallout from this will be several orders of magnitude larger than anything we have seen before. Once it gets out of the labs, this development has the potential to create cataclysmic shifts in our cultural and political landscapes.

This is where we need to get in on the action and profit from it. However, as of now, we are poorly equipped to capitalize on this, as our terminology is outdated and disconnected from modern science.

We are behind the curve, as our most commonly deployed strategy is that of picking an uphill battle by using this recent research in an attempt to rehabilitate the old “race” concept. I mean, for example, by saying things like “finally, scientists proved us right that race is real,” or that “at last, research reveals that the races have different levels of intelligence,” and so on. This naïve approach has proven ineffective for two reasons. Billions were spent in the humanities to inoculate the “race” term by preventing it from being linked to genetics, and there were also equally large sums invested in the sciences to prevent genetics from being tied back to “race.” Many scientists are actually hoping that white advocates will limit themselves to such strategies, as they have ready-made stock answers to distance themselves from such reactionary “racial” terminology. Here, I will outline a strategy that may allow us to neutralize the billions spent to demonize the “race” term in order to make the billions spent on genomics actually work for us instead.

I believe that the correct strategy is for us to bypass the “race” concept entirely and to define ourselves directly via genetics. Thus, if we could realign our concepts with current scientific newspeak, we could gain an initially unwilling, but powerful, new ally. Imagine a battlefield on which two large armies are meeting: “anti-racism” on one side and precision medicine on the other. There is a very weak force in the middle under fire from both, which is us. What I am proposing is to move our units up to the geneticist camp and adopt their uniforms. They will not be able to fend us off, as once we wear their colors, our message will be entirely compatible with their position, so they will not be able to distinguish us from their own. This will also mean that the “anti-racist” army would no longer be able to bombard us with their heavy artillery without also hitting the entire scientific establishment, as we would be too close to them.

Our opponents will find it a lot more challenging to argue against the cutting edge of science – which is backed by the scientific establishment — than against archaic concepts rooted in the eighteenth century. In this way we could sidestep the “race” and “racism” trappings entirely, thus neutralizing billions of dollars and decades of brainwashing that our enemies spent on them. Our opponents would be deprived of their most powerful weapons, while we could go on the offensive with just as powerful of a vocabulary that derives its credibility from modern science, also backed by billions of dollars of investment. A much more level playing field, indeed.

What does this mean in practice?

Those more academically inclined should regularly review the research on bioRxiv and other top-tier journals such as Nature, most of which is freely available. Look for genetic association studies, polygenic scores, and how these intersect with trans-ethnic prediction of complex traits. Absorb their terminology and start incorporating them into your messaging. This is actually already happening to an extent. Take a look at a paper from 2021 where the authors examined the recent trend in increased genetic ancestry testing among White Nationalists.[5] This naturally-occurring development should be amplified and given every possible support.

I also have a set of simple, practical tips that will help you to navigate debates and present our ideas to the public within the framework of these new concepts, most of which don’t require any advanced understanding of genetics at all.

Our adversaries have a set of talking points about “race,” together with hardwired Pavlovian conditioning of general audiences against anything positive that you have to say involving this term. All they need to do is to invoke a few keywords to elicit the desired response from the audience, thanks to the billions spent on “anti-racism” propaganda. To counter this, I will first outline this new strategy, then I will flesh out and detail each of the required steps. It boils down to observing the following three simple rules:

1. Don’t marginalize yourself by using archaic terms.
2. Concede that people cannot be grouped into discrete categories.
3. Assert that genetic similarity is an essential property that contributes to political interests.

1. Don’t marginalize yourself by using archaic terms.

Avoid using any “racial” terminology altogether, for example by referring to ourselves as the “white race.” Note that I did not say not to use the term white, just to drop the “race” part — more on this later. This also covers such terms as “negroid,” “miscegenation,” “mulatto,” and similar archaic phrases not used by anyone outside of our circles. These terms do little to advance our cause. All they do is to create a verbal ghetto that marginalizes our ideas, thus preventing our message from reaching a wider audience. Some, especially the older generation, may be attached to these terms for sentimental reasons. Some may even feel that we have to rely on these terms to be able to communicate our messages. This is not the case, as everything we believe in can be expressed through neutral or scientific terminology, as I will show later. I therefore believe that it is time to let these terms go.

For those irreverent and proud ones who believe that we should stick to them until everyone else does, I would urge them to be more pragmatic. We are too poor and too few to force the mainstream to adopt our terminology, but we can still win if we practice a bit of verbal judo. We can’t get them to adopt our terminology, but they cannot stop us from adopting theirs, and with that, eventually to get them to convert to our views. Why fight on a battlefield that our enemies chose so that they will be at an overwhelming advantage, if we could move the goalpost to take the high ground by modernizing our vocabulary?

2. Concede that people cannot be grouped into discrete categories.

I realize that this suggestion may seem even more shocking, and some may even consider this an admission of defeat. However, this is absolutely not the case. This move is equivalent to a chess gambit where you sacrifice a low-value piece to gain the upper hand later.

By conceding that “racial types” as discrete categories do not exist, you defuse the main trick geneticists use to distance their research from our positions. The discrete “race” concept is rooted in nineteenth-century theories of a polygenist model whereby humanity evolved via discrete, non-overlapping types, sometimes considered to be different (sub)species. If they are ever asked about “race,” geneticists usually try to shoehorn it into this definition and then point out with relief that this is not supported by science, and that the evidence rather suggests a single, recent origin and continuous variation between all of humanity. You should not challenge them on this, as this is in fact correct. If you really wanted to throw them off, you could even get ahead of them by saying that you didn’t believe that “races” exist. Strictly speaking, if you were to take the “race is a social construct” proposition at face value, this would not be untrue. This is the chess gambit, which is actually not an issue for you and never was, as the desired concept we always wanted acknowledged was not discreteness.

3. Assert that genetic similarity is an essential property that contributes to political interests.

The issue we in fact always wanted to be recognized is the essential, immutable property that genetic variation represents. This is the property that divides us into groups of Us and the Other. The fact that the boundaries of this division are fuzzy — that is, non-discrete — is a distraction. Using the metaphor of a rainbow, you could say that just because the colors continuously blend into each other does not invalidate the essential difference between the colors of the spectrum. This is the key. Only the ignorant would conclude that if the “races” aren’t discrete types, then human variation therefore cannot have essentialist properties. These two conditions do not intrinsically depend on each other at all. Genetic variation isn’t random; it systematically differs based on ancestry, with those more closely related sharing a greater genetic identity. It is irrelevant that this genetic kinship changes along a smooth gradient rather than via abrupt, discrete steps.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.

Thus, our political manifesto could be summarized by stating that the more genetically similar individuals are, the more their political interests are aligned as well. This is also the irreducible — yet usually unarticulated — core component of all true forms of nationalism: They rely on common descent (natal means via birth), and as I have shown, nowhere does this require the existence of any discrete “races” at all. This is also the aspect of genetics that scares liberals: the idea that it represents causes outside and prior to our consciousness. These forces motivate us in important ways, and are immutable to social engineering or intervention. This renders countries as tribal entities as opposed to propositional nations, and therefore they can form a viable basis for an essentialist identity to capitalize on.

Some of you may have recognized the nature of the gambit now, and could point out that basically all I have done is to re-express an older version of the “race” concept in a longer form, using different words. This is correct. But this is necessary because the (metaphysical) Left’s war on reality is waged by subverting concepts to distort their correspondence to objective facts. Once they have taken control of the relevant words, they then twist their meanings in ways to make them compatible with their project. However, their methods are clearly fraudulent, as by denaturing words they can only hope to affect our interpretation of reality, while leaving the actual facts unaltered. They can only hide the truth behind a veil of lies, and to win we need to find different and more precise terms to describe the same underlying essential concepts and expose their deception.

“Race” is a good example of this. This concept, as it was understood in the pre-genomics era by common folk, was simply the aforementioned continuous variation in kinship discretized into a few convenient categories. That is, once the genetic identity crossed a certain threshold, laymen merely “rounded up” the individual in question to the nearest category that fell into a few predefined bins. These bins were also culturally influenced, as at different times different levels of ancestry were required for one to be considered black or white, for example. But cultural norms are irrelevant, as those are only related to the bins themselves, which are our definitions, and not to the underlying genetic variation, which is invariant to how people interpret it.

Thresholding was also an imprecise process, so this casting of individuals into discrete categories was subject to human error, which again had nothing to do with the underlying essential differences. Thus, the “race” concept was an imperfect chassis that people found useful in the pre-genomics era. We have to admit that the Left has won the battle over the interpretation of this concept itself, but they can never win the war over the reality that it represents. “Race” was an imperfect marker that helped us to delineate our tribe from outgroups. The Left has taken this marker and corrupted it to the extent that they can now use it to attack us. Thanks to modern science, we can stop them by throwing it away altogether and replacing it with a precision instrument that cannot be corrupted. We simply no longer need the “race” concept today. It was only ever a proxy for the molecular data, which we can now measure directly. Letting it go means that this gambit has an essentially zero cost to us. Thus, we can let our opponents take our pawn (“race is a social construct”), but we will take their queen in return (“genes are an essential part of our identity”) and checkmate them in our next move.

A final important clarification. I don’t advocate that we should let easily accessible labels such as “black” or “white” go as well. It would be naïve to think that the average person is ever going to rally behind the abstract scientific data describing continuous genetic relatedness instead of basic tribal shorthands. “White” is a safe word for us to rely on, as today there are still about 200 million Americans who identify with this label, and their aggregate economic output well exceeds the budget for “anti-racism.” Whiteness per se can therefore never be demonized to the extent that “racism” is, no matter how hard the Left tries. Our tribal flag, “white,” should thus continue to be used as before, as the identity it represents is self-evident. It is only in high-brow debates, when challenged to defend our identity’s legitimacy, that you should refer to genetic kinship rather than archaic “racial” concepts. You are basing your political platform on the fact that two random white people share more genetic material with each other than with any other outgroup. Consequently, the more genetically similar we are, the more our natural interests are aligned as well.

If questioned about mixed people or individuals of uncertain ancestry, the answer remains the same: You share an interest with them to the degree that they share your (partial) genetic identity — and that’s it. Just keep using “white” as before, but avoid mentioning anything “racial.” If cornered, be smart and don’t try to use genetics to prop up arguments based on “racial types” (which is the currently preferred – and misguided — strategy used by our side). Instead, you should bypass “race” with genetics directly. This will reduce the odds of you encountering resistance and will also lower the chances of you getting accused of being a “racist.” This latter is still likely to happen eventually, but you already know what to say to that.

Conclusion

Combining this tactic here with the strategy outlined in my last article could potentially form the core of a new, robust political platform. To summarize, we neutralized hundreds of billions spent on propaganda toxifying both the “race” and “racism” concepts. “Race” may be a social construct, but genes are certainly not. However, since you no longer define whites by “race,” as you have bypassed the “race” concept with genetics, this is not a problem for you anymore. Then, as per my last article, you simply reject the “racism” concept entirely in a Nietzschean way by saying that you do not recognize the moral value of such an accusation. This latter approach will seem even more effortless, as you did not define our identity via “race” in the first place. Finally, this new platform will also retain a mass appeal, as you will continue to address those you wish to influence via accessible tribal labels that they recognize.

White cultural and economic dispossession, combined with the scientific developments I have outlined, will create a political vacuum and opportunity for pro-white political movements like never seen before, provided that we have the tools to navigate this new landscape. Realigning our vocabulary and mindset to accommodate these developments may take years. However, if we start now and work hard to reposition ourselves for the twenty-first century, then we will be ready to offer the most viable political option for our people when our time comes.

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

• First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
• Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

• your payment
• the recipient’s name
• the recipient’s email address
• your name
• your email address

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.

Notes

[1] National Institutes of Health (NIH), “All of Us,” Nih.gov, 2019.

[2] “Genome UK: 2021 to 2022 implementation plan,” GOV.UK.

[3] Lee JJ, Wedow R, Okbay A, Kong E, Maghzian O, Zacher M, et al., “Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature Genetics,” Nature, July 23, 2018; 50(8):1112–21.

[4] Sherman RM, Forman J, Antonescu V, Puiu D, Daya M, Rafaels N, et al., “Assembly of a pan-genome from deep sequencing of 910 humans of African descent,” Nature Genetics, November 19, 2018, 51(1):30-5.

[5] Panofsky A, Dasgupta K, Iturriaga N, “How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, September 28, 2020, 175(2):387–98.